


In Another Life

by StellarRequiem



Series: Another Time and Place [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Crying, Embrace, F/M, Fluff-ish?, Future Fic, Hugging, Sansa-centric, it's not NOT fluff, mildly brainwashed Sansa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 11:04:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1686038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa has been Alayne a little too long:  she doesn't recognize Sandor at first, because she no longer recognizes herself.</p><p>Part of a series of minifics that  about possible future encounters between Sansa and Sandor. Vignette style, minimal context, choose your own backstory . . . because you couldn't pay me to try and guess where ASOIAF is actually headed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Another Life

**Author's Note:**

> This one goes out to the tumblr anon who specifically asked me for more Sansan: I promised you a fic tonight, and I have delivered. It's 2:00 am and I don't know if this is what you had in mind and make no promises about quality, but here it is. I hope you enjoy it!

“ _You,_ ” he hisses. It frightens her, and she reels away from him.

“My lord?” she replies, and the hulking stranger comes to her in two strides and snaps her sharp chin in his massive, calloused hand. She’s a woman now, she’s been a woman for years really, but she squeaks like a small girl. Or a mouse, or . . .

“The little bird,” he growls, “Sansa.”

He breathes the words into her face and she thinks he means to kiss her. She sucks in a short, ragged breath and slaps his hand away. He stares at her a moment and then laughs.

“Or is it?” he says, still laughing. She smooths her skirts and takes the opportunity to put some distance between them again.

“I do not know you, my lord,” she says, “nor do I know any birds.”

His mirth turns to cold, and to ash. His face falls and hardens. His mouth twistches.

“You don’t know me?”

He closes in on her again. She backs away until her spine impacts the cold stone of the wall.

“No, my lord, I do not. My name is Alayne, not—”

“ _Alayne_?”

He sputters her name back to her, and closes his hands around her biceps. Rather than kiss her, now it seems he means to shake her, snarling at her and leaning over her with half a mouth and half a face and eyes so full of hate . . . no, not hate. It’s more despair than hate. More shock. His expression is one of fury but the look in his eyes is that of a man who has learned he’s about to die. He repeats her name again in a growl.

“Alayne? No. _You,_ ” he snaps, “are a Stark from Winterfell. A wolf bi—you are Eddard Stark’s daughter . . .” and he goes on to tell her a horror or a tale about a man dying, headless and twitching at the feet of the seven and a bygone child king, insisting that this Eddard is her lord father, fingers digging into the flesh of her arm as if intent on making her flinch. The story alone is enough to do that, though, and he doesn’t need to. She’s certain he’s pressing bruises into her. Unbidden tears prick at her eyes, and she blinks them back.

“Unhand me,” she orders him. _I don’t know you._

_I am not your little bird._

He ignores her. He tightens his grip and pulls on her, pulls her all the way into his chest and stares down his nose at her, his hair falling into her face.

“I was there when they killes him,” he rasps, “and when they beat you, I—I was there at the Blackwater. I came to your room, took your song,” his nails are cutting her and her arms are numb under his grip. If he had steel with him, she doesn’t doubt that it would be at her throat, demanding another song from her. A song of some other maiden in some other world who stands by at great battles and does not hide, high, high in a snowy keep. A song, and a lie, and a _kiss_ . . .

Of all the things, this she remembers. It returns to her like one of her own stray thoughts: the wine taste of his mouth and the firm press of it on hers in the dark.

“You kissed me,” she sputters, “You kissed me, once, in another life.”

He looks more bewildered now, his mouth twitching, than he had looked angry a moment before. She shakes her head, and insists.

“You came to me, and took a kiss, and a song, like you said . . .” her hand wanders to his face. There’s an old burn there that traces a pattern into her palm that feels strange somehow, as if her hand were larger now then the last time she’d placed it there. Perhaps It is. “It was the song of the mother. I was so frightened of you, it was all I could remember.”

At that he releases her arms. She thinks she feels his fingers tremble as they peel away, though it’s difficult to be sure past the pins and needles of renewed circulation that take their place.

“It made you stop,” she continues, recalling it now in fragments. Moisture on her palm, stickiness and something smoother. Tears and blood. His voice cracking like iced up stone. _Little Bird._ Why had he called her that? Little bird, chirping, chirping someone else’s songs . . . kings’ songs, knights’ songs, fair maidens’ songs. Sansa’s songs.

Sansa Stark’s songs.

Sansa Stark whose lord father had died at the hands of her betrothed, whose murder she’d in turn aided with magic black stones. So many murders: her lord brothers, her lady mother . . . what had happened to her lady sister, who had never been much of a lady? Tears prick at her again and she can do nothing to stop them. She doesn’t want to.

“That was me,” she says, “that other life.”

  _It was me he knew._

“Little bird,” he chokes, placing a thumb beneath her watering eye. She shakes her head, suddenly unable to speak. Shake sit until her hair—it’s supposed to be _red_ hair—lashes her across her face. Understanding this, he corrects himself as he wipes away the tear with a word: “Sansa.”

“I’d almost forgotten,” she manages, swallowing to get the words out, “I wanted to forget.”

He moves suddenly. She flinches, expecting him to grab her again, or strike her for erasing herself so; for wanting to. But he doesn’t. Instead he does something far stranger, wrapping his arms around her suddenly, but not ungently. He draws her into the safe largeness of his chest. He shakes as much as she does while she cries, and keeps repeating her name as much to her, she imagines, as to himself. _Sansa._ Sansa the bird, Sansa the wolf, curled up against a hound.


End file.
